I’ve been known to chide Wisconsin’s lawmakers for their reluctance to enact or even talk about essential revenue reforms. It is only fair to note when they do the right thing and the good they’ve done by doing the right thing.

Yesterday the Legislative Fiscal Bureau released the April 2010 tax collection data. Two big pieces of good news here. First, collections are only down 1% from last year and that means that there will be no need for a budget reconciliation and the cuts to shared revenues and state services it would surely bring. Second, corporate taxes are up by 32.4% over last year.

Too many moving pieces and not enough info to know in much detail, but the closing of the Las Vegas loophole by enacting Combined Reporting in the last biennial budget certainly contributed to this. A very positive step in returning some balance to our revenue system and staving off further cuts to essential investments and services. Good work.

Above, I said there is still work to do. It isn’t only because to the previous trends in corporate taxation it is because Wisconsin’s revenue and school finance systems are broken, and till they are fixed school cuts will continue all around the state. Here are some recent examples: